The sharing of videos on websites has developed into a worldwide phenomenon, supported by hundreds of thousands of websites. Video hosting sites, such as YouTube™ currently have billions of videos that include millions of popular videos owned by individual users. If advertisements are placed on the popular videos, revenue would be generated from the videos and the individual users would receive financial rewards for uploading the videos. However, existing systems that host videos do not allow individual users that submit popular videos to the systems to generate revenue from the videos and share the revenue with the users.
A first problem present in existing systems is that they do not provide a mechanism for individual users to share revenue generated by popular videos. For example, existing systems do not allow placing advertisements on videos owned by individual users.
A second problem present in existing systems is that they fail to predict which videos will be popular in future and miss profitable opportunities to place advertisements on future popular videos. For example, existing systems consider videos as popular videos only when the videos are already popular. As a result, existing systems fail to place advertisements on the videos before the videos become popular and miss out on revenue that can be generated during this time period.